For manufacturers of semiconductors, computer equipment, electronics, circuit boards, or the like, the scheduling systems or software tools currently available on the market are expensive and cannot be customized to meet different requirements.
At present, there are three main cores of scheduling technology, namely, exact method, dispatching rule, and metaheuristic. An example of the exact method is branch and bound, which is commonly used by laboratories or research institutes. Although it can obtain the best solution to a schedule, it will take an extremely long time and thus is not suitable for industrial use. An example of the dispatching rule is the G&T (Giffler and Thompson) algorithm, by which a schedule can be completed in a short time but the quality is not satisfactory. An example of the metaheuristic search method is genetic algorithm. It can complete a schedule with good quality in a short time for cases where the scales of the problems (number of work orders, number of machines, etc.) are smaller, but as the scales increase, the processing time required will increase significantly.
Thus, it is a common goal for those skilled in the art to develop a scheduling method that is accurate, requires a shorter processing time, and is capable of dealing with different needs of the users.